Each move of the lock-pick was second nature. One of her father’s friends had taught her how to do this years ago. She had practiced until it was drilled into her muscle memory, along with hand-to-hand combat, shooting and some simple computer hacking techniques — all useful skills for cat burglars and government agents. Her father and his friends were the latter, all members of an elite paramilitary special operations team.
“In more recent years, Hercules went by the name Alexander Diotrephes, who I first met four years ago, under…interesting circumstances. Not long after that, he passed leadership of the Society on to my father, and he passed it on to you, what, six months ago? With that turnover rate, I’ll be in charge by the time I’m nineteen.” The cylinder rotated. The bolt slid away with a click. She grinned. “So are we here to protect history from people, or people from history?”
Pierce returned her smile. “It’s usually a little of both.”
She reached for the door knob, but Pierce shot out a restraining hand. “Alarm,” he whispered.
She grimaced. Of course there’s an alarm. Stupid.
Pierce reached into a pocket and took out a black plastic box that looked like a cross between an ohmmeter and an electronic stud-finder. It wasn’t the kind of thing the average professor of archeology carried, but he wasn’t the average professor of archeology. Not anymore. Those calm days were long behind him now. He missed the quiet sometimes, but he had no regrets. He was living every archeologist’s dream, which sometimes included breaking into a museum. He held the device close to the door and moved it along the edge of the frame. As he swept the device across the top of the door, a red LED began to blink, and then it remained steadily bright. Pierce gave a satisfied nod and pressed a button on the device. When he lowered his hand, the device remained in place, magnetically affixed to the door.
“Open it,” he said. “Slowly.”
She turned the knob and eased the door open an inch, then another. There was no clangor of bells or sirens alerting the world to their unauthorized presence. The door was equipped with a contact-circuit — the idea was that when the door was opened, the circuit would be broken, triggering the security alarm — but the electromagnetic induction field generated by the black box ensured that the circuit remained unbroken, even though the contacts were no longer touching. Of course, the alarm was not the only security measure they would have to worry about. The museum also employed a night watchman.
Pierce pressed his face close to the gap. “All clear.”
He gripped the door and slipped inside. Just before he disappeared completely, he waved her forward. Once she was inside, Pierce reached up to the top of the door and carefully slid the black device around to the inside of the door frame. With the door firmly shut and locked, he deactivated the box and removed it, slipping it back into his pocket.
The service door opened into what appeared to be a supply room. Pierce shone his red flashlight around until he found a door leading deeper into the museum. He motioned for her to follow.
They entered a corridor lined with several more doors, but Pierce passed all of these by and went to the double doors at the end of the hallway. After a quick check to ensure that the doors were not rigged with an alarm, he cautiously opened them to reveal a dimly lit room.
Fiona recognized what lay beyond from their visit earlier in the day, a gallery of sculptures, some of the pieces life-sized and dating from the late Hellenistic and early Roman periods. The sculpted likenesses of gods and mythical heroes represented the tail-end of Crete’s history, at least as far as archaeologists like Pierce were concerned. The museum contained antiquities dating back more than seven thousand years, to the Neolithic period, long before the rise of Classical Greek civilization.
Most of the collection in the twenty-one exhibition rooms of the Heraklion Museum was dedicated to the Minoan culture, which had not only dominated the island of Crete but much of the Mediterranean up until about 1200 BC. Then their society vanished so completely that, by the time of Alexander the Great, the Minoans were remembered only in myths, a forgotten kingdom. One contributing factor had been the catastrophic eruption of a volcano on the nearby island of Thera — the largest volcanic event in recorded history, an order of magnitude greater than the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. Many scholars believed that the Minoan culture had been the inspiration for the legendary Atlantis, described in the dialogues of Plato as a highly advanced but arrogant civilization, wiped out by angry gods in a single day.
Although later civilizations had occupied the site of the ancient Minoan capital, it remained buried until 1878, when the ruins of the ancient palace of Knossos were found, just three miles from the site of modern day Heraklion. More than a century later, archaeological excavations continued to shed new light on the Minoan culture, and it was one such discovery that had attracted the attention of the Herculean Society.
Fiona knew much of this from her own studies, but strolling the galleries with Pierce that morning, he had been unable to resist the urge to lecture, and he had filled in the gaps. He was silent now, communicating only with hand signals. He pointed to an opening in the center of the far wall. Fiona nodded and crept through the gallery to the arch that led into the adjoining room. She edged out, looking and listening for any signs of the roaming watchman. When she detected nothing, she turned back and signaled a thumbs-up to Pierce, who was checking out the doorway in the opposite corner. He returned the signal and then motioned for her to join him.
The room beyond the doorway contained relics recovered from the ruins of Phaistos, a Minoan palace thirty miles away on the south shore of the island. The artifacts were arranged in simple glass display cases, with very little supplemental interpretive information. Most of the pieces were simple — bits of pottery, tools and jewelry. Irreplaceable items to be sure, but with very little intrinsic value, which no doubt accounted for the sparse security measures. But there was one artifact in the room that was truly unique. The reason for their after-hours ‘visit.’
The Phaistos Disc was mounted in a circular metal bracket that reminded Fiona of a two-sided swivel mirror, secured behind panes of glass in a free-standing display case, in the center of the room. The artifact was a pancake-flat circle of glazed and kiln-fired clay, almost six inches in diameter, decorated on both sides with a series of symbols that spiraled from the center.
Almost from the moment of its discovery in 1908, in the basement of the Phaistos palace complex, the Disc became one of the greatest mysteries in archaeology and language studies. The symbols, forty-five distinctive pictograms, arranged into different ‘word’ combinations, were the source of the mystery. The pictograms, which were very similar to Egyptian hieroglyphs and depicted the shapes of people, animals, plants, tools and weapons, formed a message of some kind. Some believed it was an ancient zodiac horoscope or a child’s board game. Some even believed it was of Atlantean origin.
For more than a century, all attempts to decipher the message had been unsuccessful. There was no way to know for sure if the images on the Disc even represented a real language. The meaning of the symbols was so perplexing that a few embittered researchers believed that the Disc was a twentieth century hoax. But in late 2014, a team of scholars led by Gareth Owens, a linguist working at the Technological Educational Institute of Crete, announced that they had cracked the code, using the Minoan Linear A script along with Mycenaean Linear B to identify several keywords. The working hypothesis was that the Disc contained a prayer to a Minoan mother goddess.